2012年6月4日 星期一

Spoon fed: how cutlery affects your food 金屬餐具左右美味！

Spoon fed: how cutlery affects your food

By Fuchsia Dunlop

So you’re having friends
for dinner. You’ve worked out a delicious menu, paying careful attention
to the colours and flavours of the dishes. Perhaps you’ve even thought
about music and lighting. But did you remember to consider the flavour
of your cutlery?

Dr Zoe Laughlin and Professor Mark Miodownik, co-directors of the
Institute of Making at University College London, think you should. They
and their colleagues have conducted a series of scientific experiments
into the way spoons coated in different metals affect the tastes of
food. And recently, they held their first spoon-tasting dinner, an event
attended by materials scientists, psychologists and culinary luminaries
such as Heston Blumenthal and Harold McGee, who had flown over from the
US for the occasion.
In a private room at Quilon, the Michelin-starred restaurant in
London, guests tried seven courses of delicately spiced southwest Indian
food with seven different, freshly polished spoons: copper, gold,
silver, tin, zinc, chrome and stainless steel. The base of each spoon
was engraved with the periodic table symbol of the element with which it
was plated.
Laughlin and Miodownik are materials scientists who wanted to find
out how identically-shaped objects such as cubes and bells behaved when
they were made from different materials. Curiosity about how the
materials might taste grew from this work. “It seemed obvious to do this
with something that people felt comfortable putting into their mouths,
which is why we ended up with spoons,” says Miodownik.
Laughlin, who is an artist as well as a scientist, designed the
spoons and had them electroplated with metals that were – if not exactly
edible – at least non-toxic, and essential, in trace quantities, for
human health. She and her colleagues ran experiments in which human
guinea pigs were blindfolded and given spoons to suck – on their own,
and filled with simply-flavoured creams. What they found was that their
subjects could distinguish between the flavours of the different spoons,
and that the metals affected the perceived bitterness, sweetness and
pleasantness of the creams.
After three years of research, they unleashed the spoons on this
complex Indian dinner, served with a flight of seven beers. The sight of
15 adults sucking their spoons like babies was an unusual start to a
dinner party, but they had surprisingly different flavours. Copper and
zinc were bold and assertive, with bitter, metallic tastes; the copper
spoons even smelt metallic as they gently oxidised in the air. The
silver spoon, despite its beauty, tasted dull in comparison, while the
stainless steel had a faintly metallic flavour that is normally
overlooked. As Miodownik pointed out, we were not just tasting the
spoons but actually eating them, because with each lick we were
consuming “perhaps a hundred billion atoms”.
When the spoons were tasted with food, there were some surprising
revelations. Baked black cod with zinc was as unpleasant as a fingernail
scraped down a blackboard, and grapefruit with copper was
lip-puckeringly nasty. But both metals struck a lovely, wild chord with a
mango relish, their loud, metallic tastes somehow harmonised by its
sweet-sour flavour. (“With sour foods, like mango and tamarind, you
really are tasting the metal,” says Laughlin, “because the acid strips
off a little of the surface.”) Tin turned out to be a popular match for
pistachio curry. And Laughlin sang the praises of gold as a spoon for
sweet things: “Gold has a smooth, almost creamy quality, and a quality
of absence – because it doesn’t taste metallic.”
The idea of a meal as a multi-sensory experience is nothing new; what
is recent is the science that’s illuminating the complexity of our
perceptions. Professor Charles Spence of the Department of Experimental
Psychology at Oxford University, another member of the spoon research
group, has shown how playing crunchy, crackly sounds to people eating
crisps makes them taste crisper, and that increasing the weight of
spoons makes the food they carry taste better, sweeter and more filling.
So, might chefs one day consider the taste of their cutlery as part
of the flavour of a dish? Heston Blumenthal has been known to serve
edible cutlery made of chocolate dusted with silver. “I can imagine a
spoon being part of a dish,” he says. “I’ve been surprised at the range
of metal flavours we’ve tasted, and at the way some sit quite well with
certain sour notes in food, like the zinc and copper with mango. I’ve
always been sensitive to metallic tastes and had thought of the cutlery
as interfering with the food; but here, the metallic note can, with some
flavours, be more enjoyable than otherwise.”
Although the evening was thought-provoking, I didn’t feel the spoons
added much to what was, in itself, a marvellous dinner. The
sweet-peppery prawns were perfectly balanced, and did not require an
astringent lick of copper, or even a smear of gold. By the end of the
second course my tongue was beginning to taste as though it had been
electroplated with metal. And even if eating honey ice cream with a
golden spoon had an air of magic about it, I’m not sure I’ll be hurrying
to plate my own spoons in gold.
Still, Laughlin and Miodownik hope eventually to produce a set of
spoons designed, for example, for stirring coffee or eating crème
caramel, and accompanied by tasting notes and recipes. “It would be a
kind of spoon piano,” says Laughlin, “to play the food and make your own
music.”
For more information on the Institute of Making, visit www.instituteofmaking.org.uk
Quilon: www.quilon.co.uk